Opposable Thumbs —

Genre-defining Super Mario Bros. turns 25

Super Mario Bros. is 25 years old today, and as a game it still feels vibrant …

Is there a specific date we consider to be Mario's birthday? He was first introduced to gamers as Jumpman in the Donkey Kong arcade game, and then later he was given a brother named Luigi in the 1983 Mario Bros. arcade game, complete with turtles and fireballs. The character was coming into focus, but he didn't make his most lasting mark until the release of Super Mario Bros. in Japan.

That happened in 1985, 25 years ago today. Mario is one of the rare gaming icons that hasn't seen a long-term drop in the quality of games featuring his likeness, and those games continue to be the most popular releases on their respective platforms. A bad Mario game is almost always better than the best game by many other developers.

Mario was created from his limitations. He has a hat because it was nearly impossible to show hair in the early eighties. He was given a mustache, and then made Italian on a whim. He wears brightly colored clothing so he is easy to pick out from the background. These idiosyncrasies defined the character and made him who he is; we can't picture him any other way. He has been drawn and redrawn, reimagined and updated, but the core look has barely changed. Mario is instantly recognizable, no matter what game he appears in.

He has since become a master of all trades: a golfer, a soccer player, a baseball star, an adventurer, a teacher, a doctor, a pinball master... there is very little he can't do. It's rare that a Nintendo system launches without at least one Mario title ready for launch, and Mario helped to usher in the era of mainstream 3D games in Mario 64, a masterpiece of platforming. If you've never played a video game, you still know who he is. If you have gaming consoles in your home, odds are at least one of them is made by Nintendo and features a Mario game.

This all had to begin somewhere.

Super Mario Bros.

It's hard to believe that Super Mario Bros. is 25 years old, or that platforming games existed before Mario came along to set the tone for everything that follows. Extra lives, power-ups, hidden areas, swimming levels, blocks that created the level but could also be destroyed... you can find many of these things in games released before Super Mario Bros. in much the same way that guitars and drums were played long before the Beatles came along.

Super Mario Bros. brought all these different ideas together in a way that sang, and those ideas spread to a huge number of gamers due to the game's inclusion with the NES hardware sold in stores. You bought the NES, you played Super Mario Bros. And if you played Super Mario Bros., you most likely fell in love with it.

Mario

Shigeru Miyamoto knew how to put a game together, and even as he was creating the genre's conventions he was playing with them by giving players areas where they could break free from the game's confines, moving above the play area to escape the standard levels. You could skip sections if you knew how to find the warp pipes. If you jumped on multiple enemies before touching the ground again you gained more points, and ultimately extra lives. Games were expensive, even then, and players beat Super Mario Bros. the standard way and then began to ferret out all the secrets and truly master the game.

These little touches may not seem like much now, but Mario was oddly replayable for the time, and featured some tricky jumps and memorable level designs. Even when the game was first released it was clear the music was something special—quick, hum at least two songs from the game. They'll be stuck in your head for days.

Super Mario Bros. was gaming's equivalent of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a piece of art that seemed to come from nowhere and completely reconfigured our expectations for whatever would come next. We're still dealing with the repercussions of Super Mario Bros. a quarter of a century later. I can still feel the cold, hard floor of the basement where I first sat and played the game, and I knew then that I needed the NES hardware to fully explore the game. It was the first time I became lost in another world, and I'm not alone in that regard. This is a game that helped to define a gaming generation.

Super Mario Bros. is 25 years old, and the 2D sequels in New Super Mario Bros. on both the Wii and DS continue to sell in large numbers at retail, further proving how strong the gameplay concepts are, both then and now. We raise our glasses to you, Mario. Here's to another 25 years.

68 Reader Comments

My first video game experience was on Christmas morning, 1985. I was 4 years old.

My dad plugged the brand new NES into the TV and put in Super Mario Brothers. With my whole family watching I started a single-player game, heard that now-iconic music start up, jumped once, then ran directly into the first goomba.

My first video game experience was on Christmas morning, 1985. I was 4 years old.

My dad plugged the brand new NES into the TV and put in Super Mario Brothers. With my whole family watching I started a single-player game, heard that now-iconic music start up, jumped once, then ran directly into the first goomba.

That makes me laugh, because I had the exact same experience first time I picked up Mario. 1 jump, followed by a straight run in into a goomba.

My daughter has these craft toys called "fuse beads", little plastic cylinders you stick on pegs and then melt with an iron to stick them together. One look at the grid and the first thing that came to mind was recreating a pixel character, and of course the first one that came to mind was Mario, is there a more iconic group of pixels?

I still had that lying around this morning when Ben asked me for an image for this story, so I pulled up a Mario image on my iPad and stuck them both on a flatbed scanner for a little collage.

I guess next time she gets those beads out I'd better make Link, I'm sure there's a Zelda post coming.

I was a Sega fanboy and a Mario hater. Then I grew up a little, got an N64 for Christmas and discovered Mario 64. Then I played many hours of Mario Kart 64 with my friends. They didn't play Mario Tennis with me so much because I beat them too often

Sadly I'm still only on 119 stars on Mario 64 and I haven't cracked any of the CPU players on the hardest difficulty on Mario Tennis, but they are two of my favourite games.

My first video game experience was on Christmas morning, 1985. I was 4 years old.

My dad plugged the brand new NES into the TV and put in Super Mario Brothers. With my whole family watching I started a single-player game, heard that now-iconic music start up, jumped once, then ran directly into the first goomba.

That makes me laugh, because I had the exact same experience first time I picked up Mario. 1 jump, followed by a straight run in into a goomba.

Wow, that was exactly my experience too.

Except mine was in an arcade, on a Vs. Super Mario Bros. machine. But still.

I was old enough to drive, and it was in front of all my teen friends vs. family, but I too made the apparently standard first-timer moves to an audience: Jump once, run into goompa.

I have an NES in the garage (and a working Atari 2600, too!) - it is incredibly tempting to dig it out, hook it to the 42" plasma, and rock some old-school Super Mario tonight in honor of our favorite plumber's anniversary.

And Ben,

Quote:

quick, hum at least two songs from the game. They'll be stuck in your head for days.

I hate you with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

EDIT: did some math, removed "almost" from "old enough to drive" - damn, I feel old now

A friend of mine has a projector at his place, using an entire wall of the basement rec room for his "tv". The first thing he did with it? Hooked his Wii to it, download the classic Super Mario Bros from the Wii marketplace, and play it on the wall in all its 8-bit glory.

It was glorious. We played 2-player for hours, remembering the days back before we had our own houses and gaming gear... when we'd save up *months* of allowance to buy that first NES console.

Everyone hit the goomba the first time, and all these years later you can still hum that theme to anyone and they know what it means regardless of their age, race, profession, or anything else.

i got my NES when i was about 13.. and my favorite memory is beating Super Mario Bros in less time than it took to listen to Metallica's "Garage Days Re-Revisited" in its entirety. i did this every day for like a year. damn i loved that game.

My daughter has these craft toys called "fuse beads", little plastic cylinders you stick on pegs and then melt with an iron to stick them together. One look at the grid and the first thing that came to mind was recreating a pixel character, and of course the first one that came to mind was Mario, is there a more iconic group of pixels?

I still had that lying around this morning when Ben asked me for an image for this story, so I pulled up a Mario image on my iPad and stuck them both on a flatbed scanner for a little collage.

I bought my NES the night of a fearsome snowstorm. Everyone at the mall wanted to go home, but I had found one on the return shelf marked down as open box. The price was $25 off normal, a huge savings for a 12 year old. I bargained with my mother to use my existing allowance, and to get an advance on the next several weeks worth. Went to the checkout...and they rang up the system for $25. I said nothing to anyone until we were out in the car...well out of earshot of anyone in the store. And then my mother turned to me and said "I was worried you were going to say something."

Of course, because of the 12" of snow, it took over an hour and a half to get home (normally a 30 minute drive). It was the longest drive we ever took, and by the time I got home I was allowed to set it up and then play for ten minutes. That was also the night I learned how a heroin addict must feel when trying to quit cold turkey.

I always wondered why anyone would purchase a NES, and not in a bitter fanboy way, because the Commodore 64 also had way more games for it (100 times as many?), and maybe more units sold as well?

You're talking two different demographics with a bit of overlap. The Commodore 64 in 1985 ran around $400, if I can recall correctly. The Nintendo was around $200-$250, so it was cheaper. And just like PC vs console games today, you're not going to have the community/family experience on a PC that you would have on a console in the front room.

In addition to this, anyone could write software for the C64, resulting in all kinds of software being released while games for the NES had to be licensed by Nintendo.

After spending a few years of gaming on the Atari 2600 and Apple ][, playing Super Mario Bros. on a friend's NES was an amazing leap forward. It had graphics in the background! It had nonstop music! It had bright, colorful graphics! Even little things like the score graphics overlaid on top of the action were remarkable. I could never look at my old systems in quite the same way again.

That one title convinced me I needed an NES, no matter how much begging was required.

The Iwata Asks for New Super Mario Bros. Wii features a ton of fascinating insights into the design of the character and the original game. For example, did you realize that the first level is designed so that it's nearly impossible to miss the first mushroom? Well worth reading if you're interested in how Mario has evolved over the years.

From a good book about Nintendo, I think it was "Game Over", Miyamoto stated that he didn't know how to animate hair, not that the nintendo couldn't support it. Besides, the look was from the arcade game donkey kong and didn't originate on the NES

I have very fond memories hanging out with my buddies in an extremely altered mental state seeing how far we could get in this game with varying degrees of handicap. In a mirror, upside down, with our eyes closed, etc. Pretty much all of us could get to level 1-3 with our eyes closed every time by the end of grade 12. Good times.

I remember playing Super Mario Bros in epic runs over the first three days that I had the NES until I couldn't play anymore because I got blisters all over both hands from those damn boxy controllers. I lasted for one day without and then decided to "play through the pain".

I remember doing speed runs on SMB1, in the late 80's, long before I ever heard of anyone else doing it. For me, it was just a way to replay a good game. Using the warp zones, I could beat SMB1 in about 6 and a half minutes at the time. (Not that good anymore, I'm afraid...)

I just remembered, I used to beat it first so I could start over from the beginning with the harder difficulty levels of all of the turtles being replaced with the harder ones.

My daughter has these craft toys called "fuse beads", little plastic cylinders you stick on pegs and then melt with an iron to stick them together. One look at the grid and the first thing that came to mind was recreating a pixel character, and of course the first one that came to mind was Mario, is there a more iconic group of pixels?

Uh, duh… Adventure square? Come on!

Also, while SMB is 25 years old, the article makes it seem as though Mario is also that old. Technically, Mario was around in 1981, and originally called Jumpman - from his appearance in Donkey Kong. He also was given a mustache to avoid the same issues which Miyamoto faced with hair; he didn't have the ability to animate facial features.

I replay SMB and SMW every year, always makes me happy. It took me days as a young kid to realize the last castle had a pattern to beat it. I just kept running and running and dying from the time limit.... not so gamer savvy back then.

I always wondered why anyone would purchase a NES, and not in a bitter fanboy way, because the Commodore 64 also had way more games for it (100 times as many?), and maybe more units sold as well?

edit2:

Actually, I can't even remember seeing a NES for sale in Denmark, or mentioned in any manner. The SNES was available, and some people bought those (well, or some clueless parents more likely).

Yeah but look at how slow that game plays in comparison to Super Mario Bros., the derivative level, character design and premise. The controls even look sloppy in comparison just based on how slow it looks in that vid. Mario isn't Sonic, but it's still a speedy game. The Giana Sisters was Mario without what made Mario good, namely Shigeru because, you know, he actually gave a shit about pushing the form not carbon copying another's work.

From a good book about Nintendo, I think it was "Game Over", Miyamoto stated that he didn't know how to animate hair, not that the nintendo couldn't support it. Besides, the look was from the arcade game donkey kong and didn't originate on the NES

Yeah, I weren't really serious about the NES not being able to do hair. It was the article that made that claim anyway.

Eh, you don't want to do that. You'll be disappointed. Believe me. That old hardware doesn't play nice with new tech. You'll need at CRT.

Plasmas are pretty CRTish though in that they use phosphors.

I have a Panasonic plasma and you're right that they produce a nice, warm picture closer to CRTs than LCDs, but you will get nothing but a garbled mess if you hook up a piece of nearly 30 year old hardware with a 240p resolution to it. Not to mention lag issues. It just doesn't work. It's one of the sad things about the move to digital/HD sets. Retro games are largely left behind.